


7000 Days - Part III: Wretch

by Livia_LeRynn



Series: 7000 Days [3]
Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Cannibalism, Canon-Typical Violence, Dark, Dehydration, Desert, Dismemberment, Eating bugs, Gen, Hopeful Ending, Illnesses, K.T. is American, K.T. is black, Medical Procedures, Starvation, Theft, Wasteland, burglery, canon typical injury, self-defensive killing, survivalism
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-12
Updated: 2020-05-28
Packaged: 2020-08-19 11:34:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20209066
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Livia_LeRynn/pseuds/Livia_LeRynn
Summary: Ejected from the Vault, if Furiosa is to ever make her way home, she must first survive the Wasteland where everything hurts.  This story is interspersed with tales of the Green Place founding and other fragments of Vuvalini history.  Immediately follows 7000 Days - Part II: Wife.List of tags will grow as the fic does.





	1. The 930th through 935th Day

There is something about barren places, vast expanses of aching, rugged ground, that swallows a person. Every distance expands with no regard for its actual measure. One step becomes a thousand, then a click, then a thousand clicks, and the most massive of rock forms seem but gems to close in one’s palm.

Furiosa lifted her head from where she had collapsed on the ground and found herself in such a place. Nothing stretched before her in great, vast swathes. This one a little more yellow, that one a little more red, like washes or dye on a tanned skin, all dead. She retched her own emptiness back and clenched dust in her fist; it offered no support. She was too dizzy to stand, too sore to move, and too exhausted to feel anything other than small.

She had never considered herself a lucky person. Then as she squinted beneath the sun as it pierced through thick clouds that would never rain, she was grateful that it was almost winter when it could have been the height of summer. Then she would have dried out earlier and worse.

Even luckier, nine hundred and thirty days of privilege had left her plump and healthy if a touch too soft. However, for seventeen years before that she had grown up on the edge of the desert with just enough water and green to keep her sturdy and just enough dust and fear to keep her strong. She had forgotten the desert’s ways, but she still held their memory hiding somewhere between her bones and sinew. 

Of course she didn’t see things that way. She was dried out already, her skin burnt brightly and deeply enough to make her feverish, her blood thick enough to make her head throb. She was still exhausted from the fight where she had won her freedom. Her injuries were minimal at least, no broken bones, only shallow cuts and scrapes, lots of bruises, but she could manage those. What she couldn’t manage was the thirst; if it didn’t kill her, it would make her slow and stupid so someone else would. 

Furiosa had been many things in her short life, and though she had often felt stupid, she had never truly been so, not even as a child, at least not relative to other children. As she dragged herself to her feet after falling from thirst and exhaustion again and again, she finally knew real stupidity. She felt it making her stubborn and sun-blind. She wept tears of rage and heaved great sighs of despair at the awful truth: she been foolish to think her feet could carry her home when even her mind didn’t know the way. But she still wasn’t stupid; stupid would have been pressing onward when she knew full well water was behind her. Smart is seeing what to do even when it is hidden, and brave is doing what one must even when it is hard. Furiosa was both of these things, and so she once she had the strength to walk again, she headed back towards the Citadel.

She stopped a few times to rest; to hack dust from her lungs, to gulp air as her chin tipped up towards the brutal sky, to lean toward with her weight on her thighs. There was no rush any way; the water would not come for many more hours. By the time the Mouth spit clear, glorious water from above, her lips were cracked and her whole face chapped from chin to eyebrows. 

Joe appeared between the parted jaws of the Citadel Mouth, Joe called Immortan for no reason other than he demanded it, Joe Thief, Joe Rapist, Joe Slaver. Furiosa’s hatred rose in her like bile. She wondered for half a moment if anyone recognised her for the fallen wife she was. Then she lifted her hands along with all the other Wretched people of the ground. 

The water came in a great burst and washed away any thought Furiosa had other than her thirst for it. She cupped her hands and drank what she caught. It wasn’t enough. She reached again and found nothing but dry desert air. So she dropped to her knees and lapped straight from the ground like a beast while the Wretched beat each other above her head in a battle for the last few drops yet to touch the dust.

That night it didn’t matter that she had no where to sleep. She spent it hugging her angry, liquid guts and digging holes for her rejected water. She may have slept eventually; she only knew that the morning made her eyes sting and her nose bleed. It was only then that she felt the cold deep in her bones. She tucked herself into a crevice to hide from the chilling wind and waited for the water to come again. 

When it did she stood barefoot and caught it in her shoes. She kicked away everyone who got too close. She tore open the corners of her lips as she opened her mouth wide to chug it down. Then she waited for it to storm through her. It sat heavily in her belly like a cold stone and made her ache and cramp, but it stayed inside her. And so Furiosa lived another day.

The next day the winds were especially violent. She pulled some of her tattered wifecloth over her mouth, but she still found herself chewing dust. It coated every exposed centimetre of her skin and made her itch. She smacked her skin to keep herself from scratching: too many calories wasted, too much risk of infection when she was still coasting on the brink of fever. 

But the wind took as it gave. Though the wind sucked the moisture from her skin, it send a sunshade floating her way. Furiosa took a moment to realise what that strange shape floating towards her was, but once she did, she gleefully chased it down. Nothing could ever be more beautiful than the feel or sound of its crisp parchment in her hands. She sat on it while she cut strips from her clothing and snaked them through the holes where the old ties and worn thin and eventually snapped. She bound her breasts with these new straps so the sunshade stood up from her shoulders on its supports made of long, thin wrist bones. She was so happy she wept. And so Furiosa lived another day. 

Although Furiosa was catching water, it was never enough. Thirst was her constant companion. It sat it the back of her throat so her mouth dried, her nose and ears closed, and her other soft tissues clung to themselves. It would wake her from her sleep in a thick cloud of panic, not quite gasping for breath but at least fearing for it. Then she would rake her nails across her itching, dust-covered skin and crusty, swollen face as she tried to force herself back to sleep. 

She gave up and stood beneath an endless blanket of stars. They glimmered like salt on the pan, every shade of white and grey and pale blue. She let her eyes follow the Milky Way from end to end. 

“Furiosa.”

She turned her head to find the source of the voice.

“Furiosa!”  
She ran, chasing it without hesitation. The tones sharpened and narrowed into something familiar, something kind, something maternal.

“”Furiosa!”

Her mother’s voice led her to a lone tree standing inexplicably steady in the shifting sands and jagged stones. Furiosa wrapped her hands around its branches in the darkness and slip her palms over its rough bark. At first she thought it was dead, but then she found a single bud, fat with water , full of life – green. 

Even in her drowsy state she knew that green meant water. She ran her hand down the trunk and into the lifeless soil. She grabbed the ground by the handful and tore it away.

“Furiosa!” Her mother’s voice became louder. Others joined it as well, “Furiosa, our Furiosa,” first K.T., then Valkyrie then Grandmother and Shannian and Aunts Iris and Dolores Stroke. 

She pressed her ear against the ground and shouted, “Here I am,” without caring which desperate wretch might hear her in the night.

She dug deeper, tossing handfuls of dust into the sky. She dug until the hole widened enough to contain her body. She turned herself upside down so she followed the voices face first along the thickest root of the lone tree. She clung to it, wrapping her legs around it and holding it to her chest. She worked her way downward, like climbing a rope, and gasped when she felt it move with water pulsing within it. She heard her Mothers’ voices vibrating within. She felt those vibrations from her fingers to her toes, from the base of her skull to the root of her spine. 

She knew she would find water if she followed the root long enough. Green always meant water: her Mothers taught her that. The oldest trees had the deepest roots, especially the oldest trees in the oldest parts of the desert. They lived where no tree should – more than that, they grew. 

She dug until the ground became moist and that wetness clung to her skin like sweat. Then she dug deeper, following the taproot further into the earth. The ground turned to clay and then to mud. 

She drug until the diffuse light of early morning surrounded her sunshade and slipped beneath its edges. That light was a warm pink, like the roses Dolores Stroke used to grow for trade. She stretched so her feet slipped underneath that edge and thought of roses, soft roses between her fingertips and warm in her tea. She was still thirsty, but the Watering would be soon, so soon she could almost taste it on the morning air like dew. And so Furiosa survived another night. 

More days came and went. She knew she was healing from the water sickness when her belly groaned with a different kind of pain: hunger. She knew from her Mothers that if she were to eat, she must also drink more. She was barely getting enough as it was. Her skin was already dry, her piss already meagre and dark, her head already a dull, constant ache. But she had caught glimpses of others with food: mostly soft grubs and dry, gristly meat. She was in no shape to pick a fight, but she would only get weaker the longer she waited. 

So she planned carefully as she gathered stones and cached then for later. Her scraps of wifecloth were useless as protection from the sun or the cold, but their fibres were still strong enough to bind, or maybe strangle. Maybe it would hold water as well. 

The next watering she stood naked as the bait on the fishing tower except for her ragged socks. She held both her clothing and boots over her head, letting the water pour over it all. The cloth didn’t hold much water, but it was enough to make a man behind her angry. He slammed his knee into he back of her leg, and as it buckled, he grabbed for her cloth, pulling it across her throat. She gnashed her teeth as she thrust her hips back and tucked her chin to her chest. She cursed herself for hiding her stones and scissors, but she’d had no where to hold them. She had just her naked body to work with; it would have to do. 

With a grunt, she seized control of the man’s shoulder and straightened her legs to send him crashing at her feet. It was almost perfect, a throw to make Grandmother Fang proud until her leg gave out, and she crashed on top of the man. She raked her boot across his face in a panic, then set it down to save the precious water within and used her fingers instead. She only caught the briefest glimpse of his concussed gaze before she dug her nails into his eyes. 

“Please,” he whimpered.

_Please_ what? _Please stop? Please kill me quickly?_ Furiosa never stopped to wonder. Instead she dropped the point of her elbow and all her weight onto his windpipe, reducing him to weak gurgles. She waited the crowd looked on. By now the water had stopped, and what remained of it was red with blood from where the man’s skull hit the ground.

“You all saw!” Furiosa huffed at the crowd. “This is what happens to my attackers.”

The crowd shrugged. Then, as soon as the man stopped twitching, they lunged forward, tearing off any bit of him they could grip. When the crowd cleared, Furiosa was left with his neck and torso. Someone else took the head, and for that Furiosa was grateful; someone else would have the gruesome choice between starvation and risking human brains. 

She drug her kill to the shadows as if she were a wild beast. She returned to her cache and uncovered her stones and her scissors and set about carving up the carcass while avoiding every thought. Still thoughts came. She heard K.T.’s Concannon’s voice as she severed the pectoral muscles and Mary Jabassa’s as she trimmed the membrane from the heart. She didn’t have a bowl or even a stick so once she had made herself a little fire from the brittle grasses the man had worn for clothing, she plunged a chunk of meat onto each blade of her scissors. Then as they cooked she turned her peach stone between the fingers of her left hand.

She ate is if she had never eaten. Her teeth tore into the barely cooked flesh. She followed each bite with water squeezed from her wifecloth. She filled her belly until she feared it would burst, and she couldn’t sleep as her body struggled under the labor of digestion. She groaned as she tossed and turned, each position shifting her meal into a new slurry of pain and bloat. Eventually she gave up on sleep. Instead she took soot from her dead fire on her fingertips and painted faces in broad strokes onto her sunshade in the darkness. 

This was not how she planned to feed herself, but if this was how the Reaping Mother chose to provide… she stopped herself and shook her head. Even so, her mind flooded with memories of how her last summer with her people was spent waiting in hiding round the fishing tower. At least K.T. had taught her well. This was an easy kill as kills go. She remembered one man who managed to wrestle a knife from a boot and plunged it into Raqqiyya’s foot before he died. 

If she were to get home by Imbolc she would stand for the cleansing ceremony. She rubbed her fingers together, feeling the slick, blackened carbon between them. Nine hundred days, nine hundred and thirty-five that she could remember, or at least remember remembering; she wished she could forget more. They covered her like the dust that coated her skin. She tried to forget them as she swiped her fingers across the sunshade – nine hundred and thirty-five streaks of black charcoal she could only barely see.

And so Furiosa survived another night.


	2. The 961st Through 1000th day, or There Abouts

Many days passed. Time somehow managed to slow down and speed up at once. The days flowed into each other, blurring out edges and distinction like grains of sand on a shifting dune. Each moment, however, stretched out as broad and wide as the desert itself.

Like an animal, Furiosa rose. She drank. She slept. Sometimes she ate. Sometimes she waited alone with her twisting and her gnawing. Sometimes she curled in upon herself like a fog around the last moments of nighttime. Sometimes she stood in the first rays of morning, so worn and tired that she if she sat, she might never rise. The best days were hardly worth remembering; whereas the worst were best completely forgotten. 

As Furiosa grew braver, or perhaps more desperate, she explored more and more of the slums at the base of the Citadel. She even found the relatively wealthier sections where people lived tents or even rusted out trailers instead of stretching a sunshade between a couple of rocks like Furiosa did. It was in one such neighbourhood that she saw her first maggot farm.

She caught a scent of meat newly rotting and followed her nose to a propped open trailer window. She pressed herself against the wall and, her mouth aching as it watered, she peered inside. There was a thin slab of meat, green and gleaming beneath a layer of maggots. She watched with a certain, disgusted awe as their fat, white bodies rolled and wriggled. Her hunger turned away from the rotting meat and towards its inhabitants. She imagined them frying and crackling. She imagined how she would pop them between her teeth.

The Vuvalini were no strangers to eating insects. They would gather invading crickets from their crops and grind them into powder to add protein their rice flour. They did not, however, leave food out to rot. When it happened by accident, they would pick at the smaller scavengers and fend of the larger ones. 

Furiosa checked her surroundings furtively for any fellow opportunists. Then, satisfied that she was alone, she reached through the open window. She closed her fingers around as many little wrigglers as she could in a single motion. They wriggled their fat bodies against her skin, making her heart jump with excitement and her stomach writhe in anticipation. She scurried away, gobbling them down as she slunk through the afternoon shadows. 

She waited several days before venturing back to that neighbourhood. Each watering, she collected a little more than she needed, and she carefully hoarded what she caught. By now she had scavenged more suitable clothing than the wifecloth tied around her hips and breast when she was ejected. Now she stretched that cloth across a deep hole in the ground and used it to capture dew and distill piss to clear water in a jar with a cracked lip. 

When she had saved and distilled enough water to skip another watering, she returned to the collection of trailers and tents in the southern shadows of the Citadel. The air was dead quiet. She moved carefully at first, unsure whom might have been left behind to guard. The further she moved without seeing anyone, the more she relaxed; anyone left behind would be too weak to collect water and therefore too weak to pose much of a threat, she reasoned, but she still wasn’t willing to risk her safety on that logic.

She kept to the shadows and crept from structure to structure. She nudged doors open and reached through windows. Very few had anything resembling a locking mechanism, and those that did, she left alone. Even in these rich homes with their doors and their windows, she found very little. 

She went back to the trailer with the maggot farm and seized those white, wriggling bodies by the handful. Some she pressed to death between her teeth. Others she swallowed whole. Then, when the supply was visibly dwindling, she tore herself away. 

At the next trailer she focused on more permanent supplies: first a rough sack to hold her finds, then a cracked plate, a bit of thread, and couple of screws. She didn’t have need for the screws yet, having little else of metal or wood, but she recognised their value. No sooner had she tucked them into a pocket then she was startled by the shuffle of footsteps. 

She exhaled slowly, controlling her weight as she dropped to her haunches. She scanned the room. Nothing moved. The sound must have come from outside. She crept towards the filthy curtain that separated the interior of the trailer from everything around it. She saw no feet, no dragging cloth. 

Then she heard it again, behind her this time. She spun her whole body to prepare for an attack. But there was no one — just a few scraps of cloth, soiled and stiff, rustling in a draft. Furiosa bolted anyway. She ran from that trailer and that neighbourhood as fast as her feet would carry her. 

Many days passed before Furiosa returned to the trailers. She knew somehow that she had barely escaped with her life, but that happened most days in one way or another. She didn’t give much thought to anyone of them. She accumulated her days like her sunshade accumulated charcoal hash marks. Each one started distinctly at the beginning: a crisp, grey line on cream coloured parchment. Then they bled and blurred until there was no clean surface left.

### About Twenty Years Earlier 

K.T. Concannon took a break from packing to peek out her dormitory window. It was early morning, just before dawn. A line of cars snaked from downtown, up, and outback, following the official evacuation routes. The traffic was not much more than an ordinary work day with less than ideal weather. Adelaide still had ten days worth of water left in its uncontaminated holding tank and had attempted an exit visa system to maintain some measure of civility. It was supposed to be a controlled shutdown, and doing it better than the Americans had with Las Angeles had become a point of Aussie pride. That sounded all nice, but the truth was that nothing quite felt real enough to warrant panic. 

K.T. hadn’t been surprised when L.A. was nothing but ash; it had been all dried up for years. Even so she would wake up every morning and immediately scroll through her phone for the latest bad news. What surprised her most was how slowly the fires burned, how many days of uncertainty passed before anyone of authority would finally admit defeat. On that day the Aussies didn’t quite know how to talk to K.T., so she joked about the smoke being tinged with silicone tits and asses. When Perth was left to the forces of nature the jokes were just as morbid. 

Now it was Adelaide’s turn. Most of the other kids were heading east where city life was still relatively normal. Not K.T., she would be going east too, but not to any city. No, the freaks, queers, and wild women she called friends had a different plan: a vineyard and orchard combo property outside Renmark. That would be home, and America would be just a memory. 

That fact finally sunk in as she sorted through her clothing. She didn’t quite know why she saved this part for last until she reached into the depths of her closet and found smooth and delicate fabrics. It was like reaching back in time. She pulled out one cocktail dress with the tags still attached. She hastily wrestled her way into it, letting it hug her bum and squeeze her waist. 

Of course it couldn’t go. She needed practical things: long pants with pockets, hiking boots, sports bras, every pair of socks she could find, even the lonely singles. She had no room or reason for a dress like this and she probably never would again for the rest of her life. 

K.T. sighed then made herself a mimosa from the last few swallows of orange juice she’d left warming in her unplugged refrigerator. She didn’t bother wondering if it was too early to drink; the sun wasn’t even up yet _ forfucksake_. And she couldn’t argue that this would be her last drink. No, fruit and wine would be her new life. This was pure, selfish indulgence, and _dammit_, she deserved it. She was drinking to her old life and giving herself a bit of liquid courage before her last and hardest task.

She let the fizz dance over her tongue and remind her of humid summers and the feeling of her grandfather’s pleather chair sticking to her thighs. She remembered wrapping cloth around her carefully arranged hair to protect it from the downpours. So that was the way of the world… desiccate one spot while another another drowns; both rot. 

“Good’ay, mate,” chirped K.T.’s mother in an absolutely terrible accent. She was clearly pretending that she didn’t know why her daughter was calling. “Don’t you look fancy! What time is it there?”

“Early,” was all K.T. said, her voice flat. She should have just used voice, but she wanted her mother to see that she was well. Could she really call herself _well?_

It was all relative. Her mother wasn’t well; she had boils on her face and a fallowness to her skin. 

K.T. knew that she could still fly back if she wanted. Her family would go into debt over the ticket; all she needed to do was ask. They would do it without batting an eye, only occasionally bringing it up during family spats once she was safely back on NOLA island. _Safe?_ she wondered. What was _safe_ anymore? America had been rotting for years, drying up in some spots, drowning in others. Five years before NOLA had been along the edge of the river instead of the middle of the lake; what would five more years do? She doubted the future of her father’s New York apartment was any more secure. Adelaide at least had the luxury of an expiration date. 

“Lord willing and the creek don’t rise,” her grandmother often said. Then the creek rose. The whole family worked overtime so they could afford a second story apartment in the Quarter and gas for the pontoon boat so they could pick up their coffee and hurricanes mixed with cheap corn syrups just as they always had. They said they’d been through worse, and they kept saying it even when it stopped being true. 

K.T. knew she was making the right choice. She just needed words to say it. She took another sip of mimosa and ran her fingers over the glass’s slender stem. “I’m going to stay.”

Her mother wrinkled her nose. “We’ll get you home, Katie, don’t worry. Don’t you want to come home?” She coaxed gently as if K.T were a puppy or a frightened child. “Don’t worry about the money, but you have to be quick. The borders are closing.”

“It’s not about the money. I have friends here, Mama, good people who will take care of me. We pooled our money, bought some land.” She looked away, her gaze falling on her little, stuffed dog in a sweatshirt watching her from atop her desk. 

“Damn cult is what that is,” her mother grumbled.

“It isn’t a cult, I promise.”

“That’s what they always say. No cult ever calls itself a cult!” shouted K.T’s grandmother from offscreen.

“Nah,” her grandfather argued. “They’re just dirty hippies.”

K.T. smiled. “Yeah, I’ll give you that, dirty hippies. Look, Mama, Papi, Gram, I love all of you and NOLA, but I’m not having you sell your souls to loansharks to move me back to a dying place. I want to remember NOLA as it was. Save your money, get yourselves out.”

“Out, why would we ever want to leave?” asked her mother. “We’ve been here for generations.”

Then K.T. tried one last time to explain herself. “Remember when the hurricane came and none of you wanted to evacuate? They had to pluck you off the roof.”

“That’s your father in you talking; why don’t you ask him to fly you home. Then you can meet a nice man, settle yourself down.”

If K.T.’s mind wasn’t already made up, that would have done it. She’d never wanted any of those things, not even for a fleeting moment. “No, we’ve already talked.” 

She’d already called her father, already told him the same thing except in a vastly different conversation.

“You take care of yourself, Baby Girl. You’ll do fine; you’ve found yourself a good team, and you’re a smart one.” He ran his hand through his greying, frizzy hair he’d let grow out since he left the military. “You understand that some things aren’t meant to last. You know when to cut your losses and start something new. We didn’t name you Katrina for nothing; you’ll blow through everything in your way.”

Those were the words K.T. needed to hear. She held them to her chest then and again, even more tightly as she said goodbye to her mother and grandparents again and then logged off her account for the last time. Maybe they would all get lucky, and like pearls on a rotten thread, the cities could be restrung. One thing she knew she couldn’t do was race from one place to the next while the world unraveled behind her. That was a surefire way to end up stuck in a corner with nowhere to run. 

Her phone buzzed with a text from Sifu Lisa. No time to wallow in her angst, the truck would be here for her in a matter of minutes. K.T. downed the rest of her mimosa and considered dropping the glass on the hardwood floor. 

Instead she set it down as if she might pick it up again and then wriggled her way out of her cocktail dress. She tugged off the tags and laid the dress across her bed as if setting it out for the evening. She threw her hiking clothes on and shoved her phone in her bag out of habit. She still had a bit of room left, so she shoved the stuffed dog in a sweatshirt into her bag as she wondered if maybe her father was wrong and she didn’t really know when to let go. 

Then she zipped up the bag, tied her hiking boots, and strolled out the door, leaving it slightly ajar with a sign that read, “Cheers mates. Take what you need.”


	3. The 1023st Day

More days passed, and Furiosa gradually became more comfortable sneaking into trailers. She still ducked low and crept like a lizard and darted like a fly. But her heart didn’t stop with every breeze anymore. She stopped responding to the movements of the bone chimes or swinging of doors in their frames. Perhaps there was only so much fear she could live with, and she had already met her quota. She had always known that foolish and daring were often much the same, but now she had little energy for thoughts of either. She only had thoughts of hunger. 

It snuck up on her at first, a dull ache she could mistake for fear or even disagreement with whatever she had eaten last. Then she couldn't remember that last thing except that it was two days ago rather than one. Her breasts shrank; her ribs grew.

There were times like this in the Green Place. She forced herself to remember those dry, hot summers when the earth couldn't be bothered to sprout anything. In her youth most years were good, but by the time Furiosa was an Initiate, perhaps every other year the harvest was lacking. Her mothers would make soups out of old bones and ground root. When that ran out, the Vuvalini would send someone who was still pretty to the Fishing Tower. They would pray that only the cruel would come within range, but they rejected no one. The meat was carried home where the victorious were washed of their sins, the children kept growing, and the clan lasted another season.

Here, Furiosa saw plenty of truly starving people around her with their hollow faces and loosening teeth and nails. At first she feared them and how they would sometimes reach for her as she passed. Then she saw how their hands fall beside them, their eyes barely moving. After that, she feared becoming them, but not so much as she feared those who still stood no matter how the winds battered them.

So when she found the scent of smoking meat, she was filled with a howling want that blow out every last flicker of fear. Of course, one would leave good food unattended, but all Furiosa's caution and care were gone as well. She followed that flavour into a once-posh trailer and past a scratchy curtain of cloth. Behind it she found one of beads carved from bone. She tried to move the strands gently, but they still clacked together loudly enough to echo. 

_There!_ Brilliant red drew her gaze. A leg hanging the ceiling by a hook. A few glowing embers sat in a rusty post beneath it, as smoke rose up and out a mesh screen in the ceiling. Furiosa’s mouth ached as it watered. Her eyes stung and ran. 

She tore into that meat. She ripped it apart with her fingers and teeth, not caring when that heat of it burned her. Juice dribbled down her chin and ran down her throat.

Then a hinge creaked somewhere close. Mid-bite, Furiosa’s eyes darted to the nearest door. It swung wide open, and a man lumbered in. His face was dark and bloody, his eyes and hair wild. 

Furiosa jerked herself back so the curtain fall closed in front of her. The smoking leg was all but forgotten. All the beads smacked into each other and then swayed in unison like the crowds waiting for a trade convoy to throw a few potatoes. 

Furiosa stood there, frozen, barely even breathing. Her stomach knotted itself around the stolen meat that now felt as hard and heavy as rocks. She waited.

Then the curtain started to move. She’d lost her chance to run. Could she fight her way out of this? She clenched a shaking fist.

First a bruised and dirty hand parted the curtain. A man's angry face followed. His eyes softened, and he let out a puff of breath through his bloody mouth as he let the curtain close behind him. He was big, strong, healthy, not like her own half-dead neighbours. Sure he caught more than his share of potatoes, and he’d already been through one fight that day. 

He sniffed and gingerly wiped his broken nose. “I’m not going to eat you.”

Furiosa wasn’t so sure about that, so she gave him a reason not to try. “I…” Her voice cracked from disuse. She had to focus to find the shapes her mouth needed to make to form words. She swallowed and slowly raised and opened her hands before trying again. “I can fix your nose for you.” Each word was slow and fumbling, like the first awkward movements coaxing awake a limb numb from sleep

He scoffed. “So you do talk.” Then he raised his own hands. “Sure, I’ll let you pay me for what you stole.” He reached for a waterskin tied at his waist. He moved slowly, clearly showing Furiosa his every movement. “But not til you wash up.”

She nodded her agreement and held out her hands for the man to rinse them. He tilted and squeezed his waterskin until a trickle of cloudy water ran out. Furiosa rubbed her hands beneath it and then cupped them to catch the stream. 

“Not for drinking,” the man warned her, and then his mouth turned up in amusement, “but yes, you can wash your face.” 

“Soap?” she asked, in disbelief.

“Mm-hm, you know it?”

Furiosa nodded then splashed her chin. The water wasn’t sweet smelling like the soaps in the Vault, but it had the same slipperiness the water used to get when the soap bubbles had all popped. She kept her eyes fixed on the man as the soap cut through the grease and meat juice on her chin. She hardly winced from her new blisters. 

“They call me Carver,” said the man as he opened the bone curtain again and stopped to run his finger over one of the beads, “because I carved all these.” He held the strands up long enough for Furiosa to pass through, then dropped the beads so they clacked together behind her. Then he began to wash his own face. “People saw me take a knife to bone, and so they gave me a name. I was called something else before, but as a man must grow and put away childish things, he must also put away childish names. What are you called?”

“Now?” Furiosa asked. No one had spoken to her in many days. At first she had worried that she would be recognised, but now she had become just another nameless, hollow face. “Nothing.”

“So, Miss Nothing…Carver kicked open a metal, folding chair like the ones in the Vault except even more creaky and with extra attachments and hinges. “You said you know healing?”

Furiosa folded her arms. “I can set the bone. Whether it heals — that’s up to you.”

He hummed as he sat in the chair. He pushed his feet against the wall to make it lean back. “Go on then, do your thing.” He motioned for her to come closer and then tilted back his head. “Clean enough, yeah?”

Furiosa shrugged, but she obeyed. She stood behind Carver as he lowered his head onto a firm, leather pillow attached to the chair. Its ends curled up to cradle his chin. Her hands shook as she raised them slowly into his peripheral view.

“This’ll hurt,” she warned. Words were coming more easily now even though her voice still quaked. She tried to still it to sound more confident then she was. Those particular words were easy because they were so true; they slid from her mouth like a knife from it's sheath.

“I know. Been through it before.” Then Carver shifted his position and snaked his arm up until she felt a tiny prick at her throat. “Just in case you get any ideas.”

The blade kissed her neck as her blood pulsed, telling her exactly where it was. Oddly enough, this calmed her. It meant that Carver couldn’t surprise her with it and that she hadn’t fallen into a trap. Otherwise he would have stuck her with it already. No, while this probably wasn’t _as_ frightening for her as it was for him, it was still scary enough for that he wanted an insurance policy. 

“I need a probe, something narrow... smooth,” which Carver should have known if he really had been through this before. 

Carver rose halfway from his seat and reached slowly towards a metal cabinet.. He kept his eyes and blade on Furiosa while he opened it and felt around until he found a tool wrap. He sat again and unfurled it on his lap to reveal a variety of tiny picks, needles, and hooks. He chose a brush like a long handled version of the ones the Wives would use to paint their lips. 

“That’ll do,” Furiosa said as she held it up to estimate its diameter. “Those too,” she murmered as she pointed with the brush at a pair of tweezers , “the grabbers. And clean cloth… if you have any.”

Carver passed her the tweezers. “No cloth.”

“No worries.” 

He sighed as he leaned back, eyes closed. “Talk me through it.”

Furiosa’s voice dropped to barely a whisper. “Ok.” She brought her fingers to the sides of his nose. “Swollen,” she noted. Then he hissed as she pressed. “Feeling for the break.” She closed her eyes so she could focus. “Here.” She felt two crack on one side, one on the other. “Gotta align the bones,” she murmured. Then she aligned the brush handle with the bottom of his right nostril. “Hold still, else I’ll stab your brain.” 

She eased it upward, feeling with her other hand as it past the two cracks and lifted the depressed strip of bone between the two cracks. Then she guided it down and out and up the other side. Carver howled and cursed as he squeezed the arms of the chair, but he didn’t move. 

She had been taught to stuff the nose next with clean, tightly bundled cloth. Nothing either of them wore was clean enough to risk. At home the Mothers would have taken two narrow sticks or bones and fixed them to the outside edges with tree sap. Then they she would have give him herbs for the bleeding and herbs for the bleeding and herbs for the pain. 

Here, the lack of supplies made her feel powerless, and yet, she knew she wasn’t. Never before in her life had a man willingly placed his face between her hands. She could have jabbed as hard as she wanted, spear his grey matter while his blade only nicked her throat obliquely. This whole trailer could have been hers. 

Carver must have been thinking the same thing as he wiped away the fresh trickle of blood from his lip. “Thank you,” he said then drew a long breath to test his airway. 

“You’ll want something to brace it.” She looked to the meat still slowly smoking. “Maybe mould a bit of sinew.” She touched the bridge of her own nose between her thumb and first finger. 

Then the knife at her neck was gone. She’d hardly even felt it at after she started working, but she knew it was still there. Then all at once, she felt it move… and then nothing. She touched her throat reflexively, feeling for the slightest scratch, and found a thin, raised line. 

“Would you like some more meat?” Carver asked as he rose from the strange chair.

Furiosa nodded enthusiastically, forgetting how much her stomach was still aching from her first helping.

“Come back tomorrow. It’s will be smoked dry so it will keep, and you can ration it,” he said, inspecting the meat. “I don’t want you stealing anymore, not from me at least.”

She nodded again and swallowed down the panic rising in her throat. She couldn’t believe her luck, and she knew it was about to run out. “Why?” Would he fatten her up like a goat for slaughter, or worse, for milking? “Why give me more?”

“Because I believe you are special, Miss Nothing. You don’t belong here.”

Her heart jumped to her throat then dropped to her stomach. “No one does,” she mumbled as she backed away. 

She reached behind her with one quivering hand, feeling for the trailer door. She held the other in front halfway between a solid guard and an old, Vuvalini gesture. Carver nodded his sympathies, understanding, and knowledge that she would in fact be back for another mouthful of protein. Furiosa made her eyes like steel and returned the nod. Then found the door, took a deep breath, and bolted through it.


End file.
